Vol. 76/No. 46      December 17, 2012

The case involves a lawsuit filed by Abigail Fisher, a 22-year-old Caucasian, who was turned down for admission to the University of Texas at Austin four years ago. Fisher has since graduated from Louisiana State University.

Supporters of the university’s “pursuit of diversity” program range from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the U.S. military.

University of Texas schools, under state law, guarantee admission to students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school class, which accounts for three-quarters of university admissions. Because Texas schools are highly segregated, the plan has resulted in admission for a higher percentage of students from schools whose student body is overwhelmingly Black and Latino.

This system is not being challenged in this case. At issue is a separate program under which the university considers race as a factor for admission. The Supreme Court is revisiting this issue nine years after it upheld a similar program at the University of Michigan, ruling that universities can take race into account as part of a “holistic review.” At the time the court said it expected this law to remain in place for at least the next 25 years.

In defending its program, the University of Texas argues that just admitting the top 10 percent of high school graduates leaves out some “elite” students. The university said this excludes “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas who has strong SAT scores … but falls in the second decile of his or her high school class (or attend an elite private school that does not rank),” reported the New York Times.

More than 70 briefs have been filed supporting the University of Texas program. Included among them are 57 Fortune 500 companies, dozens of universities and colleges, a number of members of Congress, the NAACP, National Education Association, and more than three dozen prominent retired military officers.

In an Oct. 9 article in Time magazine titled “Why Diversity Counts in National Security,” retired Adm. Bobby Inman, former director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the CIA, wrote, “The national security interest in officer corps diversity must not be threatened by a broad ruling against race-conscious admission.” The brief he and other military officers submitted argues this “would seriously disrupt the military’s efforts to maintain military cohesion and effectiveness.”

A decision is not expected until late June.

Affirmative action and working class

Programs like the one at the University of Texas today reflect the dilution and transformation of affirmative action over time from its original purpose to combat systematic discrimination against African-Americans, other oppressed national minorities and women—which strengthened the unity of the working class. In its original form, transparent quotas helped batter down a century of racial and sexual discrimination that blocked millions from certain industries, jobs and colleges.

In 1974 the United Steelworkers union, after a fight led by steelworkers who were Black, won a contract with Kaiser Aluminum targeting longstanding discrimination. It established a quota that half of the places in new job-training programs would be reserved for Blacks and women. A challenge by Brian Weber, a Caucasian worker at Kaiser’s plant in Gramercy, La., was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court five years later.

As these battles receded, the capitalist rulers began backtracking on quotas. In its 1978 University of California Regents v. Bakke ruling, the Supreme Court declared racial quotas unconstitutional for admission to colleges and universities. This has been in place ever since.

What is called affirmative action today has been more and more perverted into “diversity” programs aimed at advancing a “chosen few” into bourgeois-minded professional social layers, including the military officer corps, as part of advancing the maintenance and reproduction of stable social relations under capitalism.  
 
 
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